My birthday this year feels almost completely inconsequential. A way to arbitrarily (yet consistently) mark the passage of time.
My first post-loss birthday arrived only a few short weeks after my daughter died. I was still in the earliest blackness of grief, feeling numb, like I was moving through water. The last thing I wanted to do was to celebrate myself just for being born. My daughter had been born, and that was much more significant to me at the time, but very few people wanted to hear about her or talk about her. It was like the circumstances of her death had erased her birth.
Now, four years later, my birthday still hasn’t reclaimed any of its former sparkle or shine in my mind. I used to look forward to and enjoy my birthdays; at a minimum they were an excuse for a celebration with loved ones. This year, I am (mostly) pretending to be excited about my birthday for the sake of my living child. There is a small part of me that is, surprisingly, actually excited. This is because I am starting to look forward to the next decade of my life: my 40s. Maybe because I am imagining, by then, having settled more deeply into my new post-loss reality, and even having found new meaning and purpose in my life related to my new, whole self, including who I am because of my loss experience.
There is also a larger part of me that knows that tomorrow is not guaranteed, nothing is guaranteed, and so I should try to be grateful and live my life to the fullest today, right now. I am doing this as well as I can, finding as much meaning as possible in how I choose to spend my time, and continuing to work on becoming a better person.
But it is still nice to imagine that future I described. And today, this is what I’ll choose to be grateful for.
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